From floor sweeper to billionaire
Li Ka-shing’s retirement ‘end of an era’ ASIA
HONG KONG • Li Ka-shing, a wartime refugee who used to sweep factory floors in Hong Kong for a living, retired after a career spanning more than half a century amassing one of Asia’s biggest fortunes from building skyscrapers to selling soap bars.
The 89-year-old chairman of CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd. and CK Asset Holdings Ltd. will remain an adviser to the group after stepping down in May.
Elder son Victor, 53, will t ake over a conglomerate that touches the lives of practically everyone in Hong Kong — the family’s Power Assets Holdings Ltd. generates their electricity and ParknShop supermarkets sell their groceries. The group also operates mobilephone stores and Superdrug and Savers in the U.K., owns ports around the world and a controlling stake in Husky Energy Inc. in Canada.
“Looking back all these years, it’s my honour to have founded Cheung Kong and to have served society,” Li said Friday. It’s been “my greatest honour,” he said.
The retirement came on a high note as Li’s four biggest companies — CK Hutchison, CK Asset, CK Infrastructure Holdings Ltd. and Power Assets Holdings Ltd. — reported higher 2017 profits.
With a fortune of about US$ 34 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Li has been a fixture as the city’s richest man for an entire generation of Hong Kongers and spearheaded an era defined by a handful of swashbuckling Chinese immigrants who built large empires across Asia.
“Li’s retirement symbolizes the end of an era,” said Joseph P. H. Fan, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who has researched family- run businesses for two decades. “No one can replace Li Ka- shing as the legendary founder of the largest conglomerate in Hong Kong.”
Dubbed “Superman” by local media for his business acumen, he symbolizes inequality in a city with one of the most lopsided wealth demographics on the planet. He is a property developer who has won admiration for his entrepreneurial skills and a manager with companies so dominant that they often stifle smaller competition.
For many in Hong Kong, Li is a deal- maker and investment guru on par with the likes of Warren Buffett. Li’s track record includes a US$ 15- billion profit on the sale of his Orange mobilephone unit in the U.K. to Germany’s Mannesmann AG in 1999. He is a major investor in technology startups such as Facebook, Spotify and Siri.
Li was born July 29, 1928 in Chaozhou, a city in southern China’s Guangdong province. His father was a school principal but the young Li’s formal education stopped at high school as invading Japanese troops reached Guangdong. Fleeing war-torn China for Hong Kong in 1940, Li found factory work while also caring for his ailing father, who soon died from tuberculosis. By the time he was a teenager, Li was working 16 hours a day at a plastics trading company.
After the war, Li made his first fortune as a manufacturer of plastic flowers. His career as property mogul began in the late 1950s when, unable to renew his lease, he bought the site of his factory.
Li invested in local real estate as others sold, most notably in 1967, when riots inspired by Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in China rocked Hong Kong and sent property prices plunging.
His most symbolic coup as a businessman may have come in 1 97 9, when he bought control of trading house Hutchison Whampoa from Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corp. Li quietly negotiated with the bank, now called HSBC Holdings Plc, to buy Hutchison shares for less than half their book value. HSBC agreed and Li became the first person of Chinese origin to own one of the British-founded companies that had dominated the local economy since the colony’s founding in 1841.
That reputation helped Li make inroads in China, where he mixed extensive political connections with financial interests. Li was a senior adviser to the Chinese government on Britain’s 1997 handover of Hong Kong and served on the committee that drafted the Basic Law, the city’s mini- constitution under Chinese rule.
Close Chinese ties had their downside too, particularly in the U. S., about Li’s relationship with China — allegations denied by Li’s camp. A U. S. national security review thwarted Li’s bid to buy part of Global Crossing Ltd., which operated a fixed- line communications network in North America, in 2003.
Li maintains an intense schedule, saying in a 2016 interview that he works as many as 16 hours daily.